Best practices for conducting a Successful Bounty Campaign

While ICOs enable blockchain-based ideas to take the shape of fully functioning products and services by providing funds for them, the costs associated with conducting ICOs are huge. Marketing an ICO is a mammoth task involving hefty expenditures.

ICO teams may have great ideas, but not the budget for getting PRs published or paying crypto influencers. In such cases, Bounty Campaigns are a great choice for gathering the support of the crypto-community for the ICO. Typically, a pre-ICO campaign entails the ICO team getting certain tasks done from supporters of the ICO in exchange for a reward in the project’s tokens upon the successful completion of the ICO. People who participate in Bounty Campaigns are referred to as Bounty Hunters, and their tasks’ objectives usually are to –

Reach out to more people in the cryptoverse and inform them about the ICO

Reach out to more people in the industry pertaining to the ICO and inform them about the ICO

Create a positive sentiment around the ICO in both the communities

Motivate people in both the communities to participate in the ICO.

The rewards from participating in Bounty Campaigns vary from task-to-task. Here’s a list of things you need to keep in mind while conducting a Bounty Program.

Start your Bounty Campaign at the right time – In our experience, a good time to start a Bounty Campaign would be 20-30 days before the ICO or at the same time as the pre-ICO. This will give Bounty Hunters a good head start to engage in marketing activities and expand the network of the ICO’s supporters.

Coins reserved for the Bounty Campaign should be just enough – Not too little, not too much. A standard percentage of coins reserved for bounty across the industry is 1.5% to 3%, however, it can vary depending upon a project’s specific needs. If this percentage is too low, it might be very encouraging for a larger number of people to participate. If the percentage is too high, then the value of coins might suffer when bounty hunters dump their coins in large quantities in the market.

Design a comprehensive Bounty campaign – A good Bounty Program includes all possible channels of reaching out to crypto-audiences. These include Messaging platforms like Telegram, Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Self-publishing platforms like Medium and Reddit, and crypto PR channels. Translation campaigns are useful in promoting an ICO’s marketing components such as White Paper and Website to non-English speaking crypto-audience. Each channel should have a its own sub-campaign with rules and a fixed stake.

Stake allocation should be proportioned rationally – The total Bounty pool is divided into stakes for different sub-campaigns. Make sure that the proportion of each stake is done keeping in mind the popularity of that campaign. Sub-campaigns such as Facebook, Twitter and Telegram usually see participation in great numbers, and thus, the stake allocated towards these campaigns should be larger.

Promote the Bounty Program across all channels – Better the promotion, greater the participation; greater the participation, more the buzz around your ICO. So, make sure that you promote the Bounty Campaign across all your communication channels, beginning with your Bitcointalk ANN thread. Tweet, draft Facebook posts, write a Medium post, and shout about it to your followers on Telegram. And, keep repeating these posts every now and then.

Have a dedicated Bounty Manager – Managing a Bounty Campaign requires time and effort. It is important that you keep a regular track of the activity of all the Bounty campaign participants, so that at the end of the ICO, you distribute your coins to only those participants who successfully completed the tasks they signed up for. Thus, it is advisable that you hire a dedicated Bounty Campaign manager for your ICO.

Maintain individual sheets tracking sheet for each participant – This is a must-do, for the sake of simplifying the process of keeping track of the tasks of hundreds of Bounty Campaign participants. Make a google sheet for each participant and have the Bounty-hunter share a links to the tasks done every time. This will save you a lot of trouble when you calculate the stakes earned by each participants, as all their activities will be in one place.

Turing Labs is an ICO Consulting and Blockchain product development firm, which has managed the Bounty Campaigns of numerous successful ICOs. Got your own ICO coming up and need help with organising a Bounty Campaign? Get in touch with us on hello@turinglabs.io.